The Sadist

T

he above analogy can help us understand how someone can end up spending his whole life attempting to

“master” violence.

However, at least Simon is getting into the ring with an equal. How can we understand a parent who ends up abusing his or her child?

A basic fact of human nature is that it is impossible for anyone to do anything that involves a moral choice without moral justification. George Bush could not invade Iraq without claiming that it was an act of “self-defence,” or “just punishment.” When parents talk about screaming at or hitting their children, they always justify their actions by claiming that, “We have tried everything else and gotten nowhere.” Or, they claim that their exasperated responses are generated by the misbehaviour of their children: “He just doesn’t listen; he doesn’t show us the proper respect,” etc.

It is impossible to imagine a parent standing in front of a mirror and saying:

“I am abusing my innocent child.” Any parent capable of making such a statement would have recoiled in horror the first time that he yelled at or struck his child, and sought the necessary help.

Continued abuse

requires continual

moral justifications

. In fact, the very worst aspects of the abuse that a child receives are not so much the physical fear and pain, but rather the

moral corruption

of the lies that are told to justify the abuse.

For a child, being beaten is terrible, but being repeatedly told that the beating is a

just response to his “bad” actions

is worse.

So – how could this possibly come about?

Child Abuse

For the sake of this example, let us assume that the parent was abused in her own childhood, as is so often the case.

We will take the example of a mother named Wendy, who ends up verbally abusing her daughter Sally.

Wendy was verbally abused when she was a child. She was told that she was bad, disrespectful, disobedient, ungrateful, selfish

and so on.

From Wendy’s childhood perspective, her own mother

loomed like a titan in her little world. One of the amazing things about the differences in perspective between parent and child is that the parent screams and hits because the parent feels helpless. However, to the child, the parent seems virtually omnipotent.

We can assume that the Christian God

destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because He felt helpless to reform its inhabitants. However, from the standpoint of the city-dwellers burning alive in a sea of flames, God’s complaint that He felt helpless would be utterly incomprehensible. If God is all-powerful, as He claims, how can he claim frustrated helplessness as his motivation? If an all-powerful deity cannot reform individuals, how can those individuals, with infinitely

less

power, be expected to reform themselves?

If parents

knew how large they loomed in their child’s world, they would use a far, far lighter touch in their discipline. When you are around somebody whose hearing is preternaturally sensitive, you only need to whisper; yelling is both unnecessary and abusive.

When Wendy was a child, her mother

’s verbal abuse was utterly overwhelming. The stress of having someone five times your size, who has complete and utter power over you, yelling at you, putting you down, denigrating you, or abusing you in some other manner causes a fundamental short-circuit in a child’s neurological system. It is the equivalent of taking a man terrified of heights and constantly dangling him out the open door of an airplane. He may “acclimatize” himself to the repetitively awful stimulation, but only through extreme dissociation from his environment, which comes at a terrible personal cost. Victims of repetitive torture undergo the same “out of body” experience wherein they cease to feel, and in many ways cease to live, at least emotionally.

When a child is abused, she experiences her life as a series of fundamentally impossible situations. The capacity to abuse

arises out of a lack of bonding, a lack of empathy, an absence of sensitivity towards the feelings of the child.

A child’s only security is her

bond

with her parent. Abuse is a deliberate severing of that bond – a “strangling with the umbilical.” Abusing a child requires that you eliminate your capacity to empathize with her. If a child perceives that she cannot rely on her bond with her mother – which is to say that her mother’s capacity to empathize with her comes and goes at best – then the child feels fundamentally insecure, because positive and empathetic treatment cannot be relied on.

When you are under the total power of someone who can treat you badly whenever she feels like it, you are placed into an impossible situation because that person will inevitably command you to show

“respect” and “love” towards her.

If your abusive mother

detects that you fear her, for instance, she will generally react with aggression. If at a dinner party your mother raises her hand and you cower in fear and beg her not to hit you, she will get very angry.

Thus you must pretend on the outside the opposite of what you feel on the inside. You must show

“love” and/or “respect” despite feeling fear and hatred.

Thus, when Wendy’s mother

verbally abused her, Wendy could not react with fear or hatred, because that would only increase her mother’s attacks. (“I’ll give you something to cry about!”)

Thus Wendy had to disown and repress her own authentic emotional responses and mimic their exact opposite. All her fear and pain had to be

“magically” transformed into “love” and “respect.”

This form of the

“Stockholm Syndrome” has disastrous effects on a child’s long-term emotional development and integrity. Instead of learning how to interact in a rational manner with reality, the child ends up forced into a situation of eternal hyper-vigilance wherein she constantly scans the behaviour of those around her, endlessly alert for any signs of an impending attack.

If you are driving a car and suddenly notice a number of wasps in the car with you, it will become very hard to concentrate on the road. In addition, imagine that you had to keep driving under increasingly difficult conditions, while the number of buzzing wasps in your car kept multiplying – all the while knowing that you were allergic to wasp venom – this is the endless livid terror of all too many childhoods.

This kind of terrible “split focus” (“I must keep driving / I must not get stung”) empties out the spontaneity and richness of the child’s inner life. Just as we cannot daydream while being pushed out of a plane, we cannot develop an internal discourse with ourselves if we are in a constant state of hyper-vigilance with regards to our surroundings.

If a child in an abusive environment stops scanning for danger, the pain of being attacked is then combined with the shock of surprise, and the inevitable self-flagellation for lowering one’s guard. Daydreaming, or self-conversation, thus becomes a form of

“self abuse,” insofar as it increases the risk and agony of being attacked – it becomes as dangerous as a tightrope-walker losing his concentration and risking falling to his death.

This terrible equation –

“relaxation = danger” – keeps the child in a constant state of high alert, of hyper-vigilance, and effectively prevents her from ever coming to a true understanding of her situation.

In a nation, a state of war creates the panic, haste and hysteria that prevents people from effectively questioning their government

. Just so does hyper-vigilance in childhood prevent children from rationally evaluating their parents’ behaviour.

Thus, with all this in place, when Wendy becomes an adult and gives birth to Sally, an awful series of events is set into motion.

The Child Unafraid…

To understand how parental cruelty comes into being, the first and most important fact to remember is that

children enter this world in an un-abused state

. They are not afraid, they are not hyper-vigilant, they are not twisted, they have not become enemies to themselves or others – they are curious, perceptive, engaged and benevolent.

Remember – as a child, Wendy learned that relaxation was danger. Thus when Sally is born, Sally is fundamentally

relaxed

in a way that Wendy has no conscious memory of.

Since for Wendy relaxation is followed by attack, Sally’s relaxation creates great anxiety

for her mother, because she associates it with an impending attack. In the same way, if Sally were crawling towards a set of steep stairs, Wendy would feel great anxiety and a compulsion to snatch Sally away from the impending danger – very aggressively if need be.

For Wendy, then, when Sally in all innocence engages in actions that in Wendy’s world would have triggered a terrible attack, it reawakens all of the repressed pain, fear and hatred in Wendy’s heart. When this occurs again and again, Wendy genuinely feels that Sally is

creating

or

causing

terrible attacks of pain, fear and hatred in her.

Now, the last time that someone else created pain and fear in Wendy, it was her own mother

attacking her when she was a child. For Wendy, then, any sudden eruption of pain and fear is associated with a direct attack. Thus for Wendy, Sally’s innocent anxiety-provoking behaviour

is the direct emotional equivalent of her parents’ abusive attacks

.

Furthermore, the only way that Wendy could create any sense of security and control as a child was to brutally repress her own emotional responses. In other words,

“that which causes anxiety must be brutally repressed” is the law of her emotional land.

Now, when Wendy was a child she could not brutally repress her own parents

, because that created further attacks – thus she had to brutally repress her

own

anxieties.

The difference with her own child, however, is that she now has the power to repress Sally, which she did not have with her own parents

when

she

was a child.

It is in this way that she makes the transformation from victim

to abuser.

Since she experiences Sally’s actions as attacks upon herself, Wendy feels justified in controlling Sally’s behaviour so that these attacks do not occur.

If our child continually kicks us in the shins, we consider it good parenting to prevent this child from acting in such an abusive manner. We must do whatever it takes, we say to ourselves, to prevent our child from hurting others.

What will happen

, we think,

if we allow our child to act in such a horrible manner?

A life of brutality, loneliness and rejection seems inevitable, and we could scarcely call ourselves good parents if we allowed

that

to happen.

Many parents

start off with relatively calm and patient lectures, but the absolute of “

thou shalt not

” remains determinedly hovering, in the not-too-distant background.

“

It upsets Mommy when you act like that,” we may say gently – however, like the initially polite letters from the IRS, a not too subtle threat is always visible between the lines. We talk about “politeness,” “niceness” and “consideration for the feelings of others,” and so on, but what we are really saying is: “It makes me angry when you make me anxious, so you’d better stop!”

Children, due to their amazingly perceptive natures, find it hard to take these lectures seriously, because they sense the contradiction and narcissism at the root of such speeches. Thus they generally tend to continue to do what comes naturally to them, despite the anxiety

that their actions cause other people.

Since the children

remain in an un-brutalized state, they do not themselves directly feel the anxiety that their actions provoke in their brutalized parents. In the same way, if I do not have a migraine, playing loud music will bring me pleasure. If I do have a migraine, obviously it will not.

Since children

continue to do what comes naturally to them, and since their actions continue to provoke anxiety, pain and rage in their parents, their parents feel a growing sense of helplessness and frustration and an increasing loss of control over their own emotions.

The basic lesson that Wendy learned in her own terrible childhood was that when someone does something that makes you feel bad, the solution is to stop the other person from doing that thing.

Thus, when Sally’s actions provoke awful feelings in Wendy, Wendy’s inevitable reaction is to prevent Sally from performing those actions, so that Wendy does not have to feel those terrible emotions.

To be a

“good” daughter, Sally must stop doing whatever causes Wendy anxiety.

If Sally continues to act in a way that causes her mother

anxiety, Wendy will be inevitably driven to the “conclusion” that Sally

wants

to cause her pain – or, at best, is utterly indifferent to the pain that her actions cause.

In this way, Wendy can frame a perception of her daughter that includes the pejoratives

“cruel” and “selfish.”

Now, the battle lines are truly becoming drawn.

If we say to our child: “Stop doing ‘X,’ because it makes me feel bad,” surely the solution is simply for the child to stop doing ‘X,’ right?

Sadly, no.

The Escalation…

The true nature of Sally’s

“offense” towards Wendy is that Sally is

unafraid

.

Remember that in Wendy’s childhood, being unafraid always invited attack – or made the inevitable attack even worse. Thus Sally’s state of calm or self-possession creates an overwhelming sense of

“impending doom” for Wendy.

When Wendy was a child, spontaneous self-expression invited attack. Now that she is a mother

, when Sally sits and sings to herself, this causes increasing anxiety in Wendy, and at some point she will express disapproval to Sally.

At this point, perhaps Sally stops singing. However, five minutes later, Sally states that she wants to go for a walk.

In Wendy’s world, expressing an open desire always invited attack – thus when Sally says that she wants to go for a walk, Wendy also feels anxiety, and once more snaps at Sally.

As we can imagine, this process can go on and on virtually

ad infinitum

.

There is no end to the escalation of

“little rules” that end up snaking around Sally, like an infinity of tiny spider webs that eventually leave her bound and immobile.

However, even if Sally were to obey every single one of her mother

’s “rules,” she would

still

not be safe.

As Sally becomes more and more inhibited and more and more fearful, Wendy begins to feel guiltier and guiltier. Sadly, Wendy also interprets this as some sort of

“manipulative aggression” on Sally’s part and so is inevitably drawn to accuse Sally of “playing the victim”

in order to make Wendy feel bad

.

In this way, there is no possibility whatsoever that Sally can ever satisfy her mother

.

If Sally acts in a natural, independent manner, she provokes an attack. If she acts in an unnatural, obedient manner, she provokes an attack. Since she can neither be spontaneous nor obedient, neither act nor refrain from acting, there is nothing that she can do to avoid being attacked or criticized in some manner.

The Evil At The Core…

The central problem is that Wendy is

attempting to manage her own anxiety by controlling Sally.

However, since Sally is

not

the actual source of Wendy’s anxiety, controlling Sally’s behaviour will only temporarily alleviate Wendy’s anxiety – while making it worse deep down, since she is acting unjustly and blaming Sally for her own feelings.

Controlling the Bed

To understand this madness more fully, imagine that you are bedridden in a hospital and I am standing by the controls of the bed.

“

Can you raise the head of my bed so that I can eat?” you ask.

I push a button, but nothing happens. I push another button and your head goes down.

“No, no!” you cry. “Up, I want my head to come up!”

I push another button, and both your legs and head start to rise, causing you pain.

“Ow! Not that way, just my

head

!”

As you can well imagine, this process will generate an extraordinary amount of frustration

and tension in both of us. You would be panicking and yelling at me, and I would be frantically stabbing at the buttons trying to control or reverse whatever motion was giving you such discomfort.

Now imagine further that at some point, we discover that I am actually pressing the controls of a bed in another room, and the reason that your bed is moving

“randomly” is that you are in fact sitting on the controls for your own bed, and your shifting around is what is causing the uncomfortable movements.

Clearly, the first thing that you would do is apologize to me for blaming me for your discomfort, and for railing against my

“incompetence.”

This is the typical experience of someone who finally understands that using other people to manage his anxiety

only makes his anxiety worse, causing him to further attempt to control and manipulate others, when the whole time he is “sitting on the controls” that only

he

can reach.